The deadly link between San Bernardino and Pakistan. By Arif Jamal. DW, December 5, 2015.DW and Jamal:The link between California shooters and
Pakistan has once again highlighted the danger the country poses as a terror
exporter. US-based Islamism expert Arif Jamal tells DW why Washington can no
longer ignore the threat.

DW: What sort of links did San Bernardino
shooters Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook have with radical Islamist groups in
Pakistan, and how much did they influence the killings?

Arif
Jamal: We still do not have authentic information on the links between the San
Bernardino mass shooters and radical Islamist groups in Pakistan or elsewhere.
Tashfeen Malik was a relatively liberal and modern woman for her family in
Pakistan’s Punjab province until a couple of years ago. Several members of her
family reportedly belong to the terrorist outfit Ahlay Sunnat Wal Jamaat –
formerly known as Sipah-e-Sahaba (the Army of the Prophet’s Companions) – but
there is so far no evidence that she was also an ASWJ member.

Also,
the Bahauddin Zakariya University in the city of Multan, where Malik had
studied, is a hub of Islamist groups. Although indoctrination must have started
much earlier, we see a radical change in her a few years ago, particularly after
she moved to the United States. It seems the couple was actually indoctrinated
by American Islamic organizations. Islamic organizations conveniently blame
Western foreign policies for the rise of jihadism.

How do you analyze the claim by the “Islamic State”
(IS) that its “supporters” carried out the attack in the US? What does IS mean by “supporters”?

It is
highly plausible that the San Bernardino shooters were influenced by the IS
call to take up arms against the infidel West without the practical support
from the Middle Eastern militant group. In fact, the available evidence is
clearly leading to this conclusion. The IS call for jihad against the West is
actually directed at people who are already indoctrinated and need a push to
carry out violence. The IS seems to be succeeding in its strategy to
destabilize the Western countries.

It’s been reported that Tashfeen Malik had
met with IS supporter and cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz in Islamabad. Why do
Pakistani authorities continue to ignore the threat posed by pro-IS clerics and
organizations in the country?

The
reports of her links with Aziz of Islamabad’s Red Mosque, which is affiliated
with the IS, do not seem to be authentic. They are attributed to nameless
sources in London and appear to be mere speculation. US officials do not seem
to have any such knowledge. As we know that the shooters were influenced by IS
and its ideology, it is quite possible that they had had some links with the
Red Mosque clerics. If there were any links between the shooters and the Red
Mosque, they were more likely ideological.

What is driving Muslims living in the US
toward groups like IS?

The
most important reason behind the Muslims’ fascination with jihadism in the US
and elsewhere is their victimhood syndrome. Jihadism teaches them that the
failures of Muslims as individuals and as an ummah (community) are caused by
the infidels, who must be fought against, as Islamic scriptures order them.

To what extent is Saudi Wahhabism, which
many experts believe provides ideological impetus to global jihadi groups,
influencing American Muslims?

The
Wahhabist and Salafist interpretations of the Quran and hadith are at the root
of the rise of modern global jihadism. Unlike other Islamic denominations,
Wahhabism and Salafism teach the literal interpretation of the Islamic
scriptures. Salafism aims at establishing a caliphate similar to the earliest
time in the Islamic history, when the Muslims were constantly at war with the
rest of the world. The three biggest jihadist organizations – IS, Jamaat
ud-Dawa (or Lashkar-e-Taiba) and Boko Haram – are Salafist.

What, in your opinion, would be the
repercussions of the San Bernardino killings on Pakistanis and Muslims living
in the US?

Muslims
in America have come under severe pressure from the society. There have been
some attacks on mosques and Islamic centers. Muslim Americans have reported
that the atmosphere in their offices has become tense. Some have told me that
they never faced such backlash since the 9/11 attacks. Since one of the two
shooters was a woman, Muslim women have also become suspect in the eyes of
non-Muslim Americans. Muslim women were not subject to such hateful treatment
before.

Will the Obama administration pressure
Islamabad to crack down on Islamist radical groups or will it continue with its
softer approach toward its ally?

The
Obama administration is likely to increase pressure on Pakistan to rein in
jihadist groups and close the jihadist factories, but it is highly unlikely it
will work in the absence of some sort of economic and military sanctions. The
verbal pressure has not worked in the last 15 to 25 years. We may see some
halfhearted action by Pakistani authorities against the Red Mosque group if
there is enough evidence of their involvement in this shooting. Nothing more.

Arif Jamal is an independent US-based
journalist and author of several books, including “Call For Transnational
Jihad: Lashkar-e-Taiba, 1985-2014.”

California killings: What kind of mother would do this? By Margaret Wente. The Globe and Mail, December 7, 2015.Wente:What
kind of mother would say goodbye to her six-month-old daughter, then drive with
her husband to his workplace one morning to calmly, deliberately slaughter as
many of his co-workers as possible?

Tashfeen
Malik was that kind of mother. It was she who evidently radicalized her
husband. It was she who was first to open fire. It was she who declared her
loyalty to Islamic State in a Facebook post, and fired back at the police
before the couple were mowed down in a hail of bullets.

The
slaughter in San Bernardino introduced a new face – and phase – of terrorism.
It was the first IS-inspired attack on American soil, committed not on military
targets but, as in Paris, on ordinary civilians. Yet the immediate knee-jerk responses
were entirely predictable. Guns are the problem! No, refugees are the problem!
Just get rid of guns (or refugees) and we won’t have to worry.

Tighter
gun control and better border screening would both, no doubt, be good things.
But neither of them would solve the terrorism problem. And both liberals and
conservatives are evading the central issue: What kind of new mother would do
this?

Up here
in Canada, we like to think that America’s gun culture is the source of all its
social ills. So here are just a few quick facts. The San Bernardino couple’s
arsenal of guns and ammo was, as a writer for The Nationput it, “as American
as apple pie.” They purchased their guns legally and passed all the background
checks. Such arsenals are common, and most are owned by Republicans. People are
not going to give them up. Serious gun reform is impossible in the U.S. without
repealing the Second Amendment, and that’s not going to happen. Nor would gun
reform be likely to deter terrorists. France’s strict gun laws didn’t stop the
carnage in Paris.

Conservatives
don’t want to ban guns. They want to ban refugees, along with immigrants from
suspicious countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia. That won’t stop terrorist
attacks either. Most terrorists in Europe and North America – including Ms.
Malik’s husband, Syed Farook – are of the home-grown variety. They’re the
offspring of people (often secular, educated, and horrified by their children’s
deeds) who came here years ago. Ms. Malik, who was an immigrant from Pakistan,
passed all the usual background checks.

There
are more than seven million Pakistani emigrants around the world. Most are good
guys. Pakistan’s radical Muslim groups were a problem long before Islamic State
came along, but the West is powerless to rein them in. The West has pressured
Pakistan for years to move against them, but it hasn’t worked.

Barack
Obama doesn’t have the answers either. On Sunday night he addressed the country
in an effort to look as if he’s on top of things. I’m not sure he convinced people.
Iraq and Syria are in ruins, and Libya is an outlaw non-state. Afghanistan has
reverted to its former chaos. A monumental U.S. effort to train and arm some
good guys to fight in Syria produced exactly nothing. Butcher Bashar al-Assad
is still in power, IS is still on the rampage, and the refugees are still
fleeing. No wonder he sounded a bit defensive.

Unfortunately,
attacks like the one in San Bernardino cannot be prevented by stricter gun
control, or better refugee screening, or even stepped-up integration efforts.
Islamism expert Arif Jamal, who’s based in Washington, D.C., explains why. The
rise of modern global jihadism is rooted in extremist interpretations of Islam.
Islamic organizations conveniently blame Western foreign policies for the rise
of jihadism. “The most important reason behind the Muslims’ fascination with
jihadism in the U.S. and elsewhere is their victimhood syndrome,” he said in an
interview with Deutsche Welle. “Jihadism teaches them that the failures of
Muslims as individuals and as an ummah (community) are caused by the infidels
who must be fought against, as Islamic scriptures order them.”

And
that’s the answer, more or less, to what kind of mother would do this. A mother
who didn’t care that their baby would be an orphan, or that the people she set
out to kill had chipped in for baby presents. A mother who wanted revenge on
the West, and whose only regret, I suspect, was that she hadn’t killed even
more.

Prager:According
to the father of the San Bernardino terrorist, Syed Farook, his son was
“obsessed with Israel.”

In an
interview in the Italian newspaper La
Stampa, the senior Syed Farook said, “My son said that he shared [Islamic
State leader] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic
State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”

Likewise,
the Los Angeles Timesreported, “As
the investigation unfolded, friends and family of the shooters came forward to
offer snapshots that may point to what motivated Wednesday’s attack, including
Farook’s apparent fixation on Israel and Malik’s devotion to a fundamentalist
strain of Islam.”

There
is no greater predictor of violence than Jew-hatred. It predicts violence as
accurately as animal torture does.

But
while it is universally acknowledged that childhood torture of animals predicts
violence, relatively few people understand that the same holds true of
Jew-hatred.

Given
that there has been no exception to this rule, one would think that non-Jews
would learn from it and immediately oppose Jew-haters. But, incredibly, that is
not the case. Most non-Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as the Jews’ problem — or
as in the case of Israel-hatred — the Jews’ fault.

In the
1930s, when the Western democracies had a chance to crush the Nazis, they did
nothing despite the fact that Hitler and Nazism were as obsessed with the Jews
as Syed Farook was with the Jewish state. The West regarded Hitler’s
anti-Semitism as essentially the Jews’ problem. Eventually, about 50 million
people were killed, 44 million of them non-Jews.

So,
too, when Israelis were being murdered by Palestinian Muslim suicide bombers in
the so-called Intifada, the murders were largely ignored, or worse, “explained”
by Western liberals as the understandable Palestinian reaction to Israeli
occupation.

Then
came 9/11, and America and the world began to appreciate — though the Left
still doesn’t — that Palestinian terror was about Islamists killing Jews with
the ultimate aim of annihilating Israel, not about “asymmetrical warfare,” or
use of the “poor man’s atom bomb,” or “a reaction to occupation.”

Of
course, some will object that it is neither fair nor accurate to lump Israel-hatred
with Jew-hatred. So, let me briefly explain why Israel-hatred is just another
form of Jew-hatred, or anti-Semitism.

First,
we are talking about Israel-hatred, not Israel-criticism. No prominent defender
of Israel — not one — has ever equated criticism of Israel with Israel-hatred
or with anti-Semitism. It is a common charge made by anti-Zionists that
defenders of Israel equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but it has
no truth.

What is
equatable with anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, the belief that the Jewish state
has no right to exist.

Why is
that the same as anti-Semitism?

Because
when one argues that the only country of the world’s more than 200 countries
that has no right to exist is the one Jewish country in the world, there is no
other possible explanation. There are 22 Arab countries, stretching from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, and they all have a perfect right to exist,
but somehow there is no room for one Jewish country the size of New Jersey.

When
the Presbyterian Church USA or the American Anthropology Association votes to
boycott one country on earth, and that country is the only Jewish country on
earth, it strains credulity to argue that Israel’s being Jewish is irrelevant.

Israel
is probably the oldest country in the world with an indigenous language and
culture going back 3,000 years. Yet, much of the world denies these roots and
favors the claim to the land made by Palestinians, a group that had no distinct
identity before the mid-20th century.

The
Jewish state plays the same role among the world’s nations as individual Jews
played within the world’s nations: a superbly accurate way to assess a group’s
moral compass. As George Gilder calls it, it is the Israel Test.

Those
obsessed with the Jews in a negative way have a moral compass whose pointer
points south. That’s why Syed Farook mass-murdered innocent Americans.

Farook
and all the Islamist terrorists are ultimately Yasser Arafat’s and the
Palestinians’ legacy to mankind — and especially to fellow Muslims, the
greatest victims of the suicide terror introduced by the Palestinians.

Or, to
put it in a positive way, show me Muslims who accept the right of the Jewish
state to exist and I will guarantee you that they will never support ISIS or
engage in terror.